Dorie was a piece of work. She was also Newsday's Home writer. She
was our definitive expert on home decorating and she had a very definite
mind set on what was good taste and what was not. She was eccentric.
She never seemed to age. In the thirty odd years that I knew Dorie
she looked like..well, how shall I put it? She looked like a senior
citizen from day one until I retired. She was barely five feet tall
and was handicapped with a bad leg.

None of
these things made her a bad person. She wasn't. But, she was
eccentric. Working with Dorie was an experience.

Dorie had
to come up with a weekly home decor feature. She would select
a house that some reader had recommended and with a photographer
in tow, would descend upon the unsuspecting family. Unsuspecting,
not in the sense that she would arrive unannounced. She would
always call ahead and make an appointment. But, the homeowners
had no idea what was in store for them. That kind of unsuspecting.

Some homes
met with her approval and the photo shoot would go fairly smoothly.
But, frequently, as the photographer was setting up his camera,
tripod and lights, Dorie would exclaim loudly, and in earshot
of the family, "Oh, that's an ugly sofa. We have to move it out
of the room!" The lady of the house, who had probably spend a
fortune on a decorator's advice and another fortune purchasing
the sofa,
would gasp in horror.

Dorie would
ask the photographer to move it out of camera range. Most of
us refused, trying to suggest to her that we were there to portray
the home
owner's
taste in decor. Dorie's response was usually, "Oh, alright. But,
make sure that the monstrosity is at the edge of the picture
and out of focus."

She directed
the hapless photographers like Cecil B. DeMille directing "Gone
With The Wind." It was always a production. At one home, of which
she approved, she told me, "Dick, I want you to focus on this
end of the
room
and
make
sure that I can see the lamps by the sofa. I also want to see
the window treatment on the wall on the left and the antique
credenza against the right wall. And be sure to get the painting
on the wall behind us."

Incredulously
I asked, "Dorie, do you expect all of that in one photo?"

"Of course,"
was her answer.

"Dorie,"
I gasped. "There isn't a lens made that will photograph 360º
to show all four walls?"

I suppose
that I should have been flattered by her confidence in my skills.
But, nothing could be further from the truth.

Dorie insisted
in looking through the viewfinder before the button was pushed,
to make sure that the photographer had followed her instructions
implicitly. This led to a constant and immediate problem whenever
I showed up on her assignments. I always worked those jobs with
my camera on a tripod. My tripod is set to accomodate my 6' 3"
height. Dorie, as I said, was barely 5' tall. She would strain
on her tip toes to look through my viewfinder. She did this on
every assignment and never, ever, came close.

"I don't
know why they insist on sending you on my assignments?" she would
complain.

"That's
because my editors know how much I love ya, Dorie," I would tell
her.

"Yeah,
yeah. Take the camera off of that thing so I can see what you're
shooting," she would say.

"Come
on, Dorie. I just spent twenty minutes lining up the camera so
that
all the vertical lines stay vertical and also include all of
the impossible tasks that you demanded of me."

This was
true. Our Director of Photography had fits whenever a photographer
came back with leaning walls. That's why I made sure that my
camera was absolutely level; especially when using the extreme
wide angle lens that I needed to use in order to include everything
that Dorie insisted on.

"If I take
off the camera and hand it to you, you'll never get the same
angle that I had set up."

She grumbled
for the rest of the shoot. "Why can't you be nice like Bill Senft?"

Bill Senft,
another of our shooters, had a clever way around this problem.
Years ago, Bill had owned an old Leica rangefinder camera. He
had a very wide angle lens for it which required an auxiliary
viewfinder that clipped to the hot shoe on top of the Leica.
He sold the camera but for some reason, he still had that viewfinder.
Now that he was shooting with Nikon single lens reflex cameras,
he had no use for it. But, he kept it in his camera bag for just
such occasions. It mattered not what lens Bill was using, whenever
Dorie asked to look through his camera viewfinder, Bill would
produce the auxiliary finder from the Leica and say, "Here, Dorie.
This is what I'm getting."

She loved
Senft.

And, we
all liked Dorie. She gave us lots of amusing stories to tell
throughout the years. She was like that eccentric old aunt in
everyone's family. She could be difficult but everyone liked
her.